


The Whispering Well

by chiiyo86



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud, The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Dimension Travel, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-12 03:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19939318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Number Five goes into a (haunted) bar and meets Lucy Carlyle. Among other things.





	The Whispering Well

**Author's Note:**

> You owe this strange crossover to the intoabar ficathon! This was a blast to write and I hope you enjoy reading it. :)

Five had dreamed of time-travelling since he was eight and his understanding of time and space had led him to the conclusion that had changed his life: if he could do space jumps, then it stood to reason that he should also be able to do _time_ jumps. When he’d brought up the matter to his father, Reginald Hargreeves hadn’t denied it. But he’d said, ‘you’re not ready’ and ‘you have much to learn yet about your abilities’ and ‘know your limits, Number Five,’ not to mention that tired metaphor of the acorn. Five thought about it often now that the bitter truth, that the old man had been _right_ , had been shoved down his throat. The first few days of his time in the Apocalypse, he had entertained the notion that he could make it back home and pretend that he hadn’t majorly screwed up. He could say that he’d wandered around town—or better yet, dazzle his siblings with his tales of time-travel, not mentioning how much harder it was to travel backward than to travel forward.

Traveling forward felt like rushing at maximum speed, feeling like skin was going to peel off his face and then taking a jump into the void, pushing hard against an invisible barrier as his muscles strained and burned. His stomach swooped, his chest ached, his ears popped. It was exhilarating—a little scary, but not any worse than a lot of other things he’d done. Traveling _backward_ , now—that was another story. Five had spent months trying to figure the right equations. Well, _years_ would be more accurate; almost two years, to be precise. In exactly a week, he would turn fifteen. If he managed to go back to the day he’d left, it meant that he would be almost two years older than his siblings. Older, wiser, weathered by the trials he’d endured while he was away from them. Before he made his new attempt at traveling back, he’d tried to give himself a good night of sleep to be in top shape for the big moment, but he’d only been able to grab a few hours, his mind whirling with hopes and calculations and what-ifs. He’d imagined the awe on his siblings’ faces as he recounted what had happened to him and how he’d survived on his own. He’d relished in thinking of what a bump in the hierarchy his (almost) two whole years would give him. They would _have_ to bow to his age and experience. 

That is to say, if he managed to survive the travel itself. Traveling back was nothing like what he’d experienced before. His lungs were crushed, his stomach was trying to turn itself inside out and his ears roared with an infernal noise that was burrowing into his brain. His eyes were seared by blinding white-blue light. His arms were tugged by an invisible force, almost pulled out of their sockets. And that was only the beginning—the unbearable pressure grew to unimaginable levels, holding him in a vice and squashing him, flaying his skin, pulling his tendons taut, pulping his muscles, grinding his bones to dust. He tried to wrestle against it, tried to keep the figures straight in his head, to give his mangled body a sense of _aim_ , but the pain was immense and scattered his thoughts to the four winds. His mind fragmented to molecules, tiny specks of Five drifting away from each other, diluting his sense of self, stretching it to the point of breaking. He clung to it with all his willpower. He was Number Five Hargreeves, member of the Umbrella Academy, brother to Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben and Vanya. Space-jumper, time-traveler. He was Number Five of the Umbrella Academy, brother to Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben and Vanya, space-jumper and time-traveler. He was Number Five of the Umbrella Academy, brother to Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben and Vanya. He was Number Five, brother. He was—

—hurled at a hard surface, his face smashing against it. He had a face, right, or so the pain told him. He groaned, the sound loud and startling against the buzz in his ears. He had teeth, a tongue, spit that he swallowed with effort, feeling it go down his raw oesophagus. He had fingers, that he wriggled to see if any were broken, arms and legs and feet. His muscles felt like they’d melted down to water, but he gathered his limbs under him. They were as heavy as if he’d worn bracelets of lead around his wrists and ankles—something he’d actually done in the past during his father’s training sessions—so it took a while, but he eventually managed to push himself up on hands and knees. Only then did he open his eyes to check his surroundings.

If he were honest with himself, he’d been scared to look. Scared to open his eyes and see the familiar ravaged landscape, dulled by a veil of drizzling ashes. It was dark and at first his vision was too blurry to make out much, but he could see a point of bright light and he focused on it, his fingers clenched in painful hope. It looked like a lantern; there hadn’t been any lit-up lantern in the Apocalypse. He took a breath and it smelled damp, like wet stone and asphalt, like soil, and no ash came to clog up his airways. His vision cleared and he could see that the bright spot was indeed a lantern, swaying gently back and forth, its pale light catching the wisps of fog that were wrapped around it like fraying fabric. The light was cold, eerie, but it wasn’t natural light and it was suspended under the porch of a building whose brick walls were painted white, illuminating a sign on which was written in Gothic lettering, ‘The Whispering Well.’ 

_I made it. I made it, I made it, I made it._

His eyes burned and Five had to blink as his vision blurred again. His nose itched and he rubbed a hand under it. The building had the appearance of an old English pub—it wasn’t a place Five knew, so he wasn’t near the Academy. Actually, from the stifled silence around him, he would say that he wasn’t downtown at all, but it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that he wasn’t _there_ anymore; beyond that he figured he could find a way to make it back home. He just had to get up on his feet, walk the few feet that separated him from the pub, ask for water and maybe food.

It was easier said than done. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself up, but his legs, as strong as overcooked noodles, kept buckling under his weight, and his arms were pretty much no help at all. He briefly considered a space jump, but if he couldn’t even stand up then there was little chance that he could use his powers. His ears were still ringing and his head was killing him, the pain like a band fastened tight around his skull. _Come on, come on. You’ve bent space and time! You can manage to get on your own two feet._ A higher station didn’t agree with him and he swayed, caught in the whirlpool of a dizzy spell. His stomach rolled and he clutched his middle, worried that he was about to throw up. Puking on an empty stomach was no fun, as he knew all too well. 

He staggered over to the pub’s door and slumped against it, already exhausted. It was a wooden door, the upper part paneled with glass panes; it didn’t look like the pub was open, but Five could see lights flickering inside. He knocked and the lights danced behind the frosted glass, but the door didn’t open. Muffled voices could be heard, so Five knocked again as hard as he could muster. The whispers behind the door became louder, almost furious, as though the people inside were arguing with each other about opening. Five raised his fist again and pounded on the glass panels. Blinking lights fluttered in front of his eyes and the ringing in his ears had increased, almost drowning every other sound. When the door opened suddenly, Five had to grip the frame to prevent himself from pitching forward.

The face of a girl appeared in the gap of the half-open door. She looked about his age and had thick eyebrows that knitted together over severe eyes. “Pub’s closed to the public,” she droned on, an annoyed edge to her voice. “We have a visitor situation here. Go home, it’s past curfew.”

 _What?_ The girl had an English accent and her words made no sense to Five. The ground moved under his feet and his vision darkened at the edges. “Whoa,” he heard the girl say distantly. “Are you okay? You—”

The rest of her sentence was lost to the high-pitched whine in his ears. His vision was devoured by blackness and the last thing he knew before he lost consciousness was that he was falling. 

—-

“I think he’s waking up.” The voice sounded distorted to Five, as if he were hearing it with his head plunged in water. 

“14 degrees. We dropped two more degrees.”

“Thank you, George.”

“Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Yes.”

“In case you cared about the ghost, and all.”

“Yes, _thank you_ , George. Hey.” A hand was on Five’s shoulder, shaking it. “Hey, boy. Can you wake up? We’re in a bit of a situation and we need you functioning quickly.”

 _I’m trying!_ Five thought peevishly. His eyelids weighed a ton and lifting them was almost as hard as tearing through time and space had been. His headache had turned into a focused drilling pain in the middle of his forehead and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes at how much it hurt. 

“Yes, yes, that’s it. Good man. Open those eyes.”

He was lying on a flat, hard surface, his feet propped up on a chair. The first thing he could clearly see was the green tiles of a coffered ceiling, blackened from suit or smoke. It was still dark wherever they were—the inside of the pub, most likely—and at first Five thought there might be a problem with his eyes until he saw the flickering of a flashlight at the edge of his vision field. 

“Hey. Welcome back.”

Turning his head felt like it might cause his brain to leak through his ears, but Five managed to move it enough to take stock of what was around him. He was on the floor and couldn’t see much of the room beyond wooden legs from the tables and chairs. Three people were standing in a half-circle around him: a lanky, dark-haired boy who wore a long coat, a chubby bespectacled boy, and the girl who’d opened the door. They were all close to Five’s age and were all holding rapiers as though they expected to have to use them at any moment. Against him? No, their focus wasn’t entirely on him, even though he’d crashed at their feet and was only just waking up. Their expectant, watchful positions hit Five with a wave of déjà-vu—they stood like Five and his siblings when they were on a mission and weren’t sure where the danger would come from. This sent a little jolt of adrenaline coursing through Five’s body, making the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He took his feet off the chair and struggled to sit up. If they were going to be attacked, he wasn’t about to take it lying down. 

“Great. You look better,” said the dark-haired boy. “Doesn’t he look better? Maybe he’d like a cuppa. George, where’s the thermos?”

George, the boy with the glasses, looked up from something—with some puzzlement, Five saw that what he had in his hand was a thermometer. “What? Uh, Lucy has it.”

“Lucy?”

“Yeah, here it is.”

The dark-haired boy shoved a thermos bottle in Five’s hands. Five brought it to his mouth and drank the lukewarm tea in it, feeling a little dazed. He hadn’t been with people in almost two years. It wasn’t that he hadn’t _talked_ —Dolores, the mannequin he’d picked up from the rubbles of a department store, was a good listener and he’d babbled to her at length—but it wasn’t exactly the same. Just being in a room with three other people was enough to make the space feel crowded, and he was rapidly becoming self-conscious about how unkempt he looked, his clothes, face and hands covered with a slimy layer of grime. At first, he’d tried to wash as often as he could, aware of how much his mom would disapprove him looking like a hobo. After a while it had become a secondary concern to survival and finding a way to go back home, but now he was taken over by the stupid urge to scrub his face and tear off his neck the dirty scarf that he used to cover his nose and mouth. To top it all, the little oddities that he was picking up were putting him on edge—the tensed atmosphere of impending danger, the fact that the three kids, with their flashlights and old-fashioned weapons, didn’t look like they had a right to be in the pub. Their accent was noteworthy as well; had he stumbled upon a group of English friends or had he miscalculated so badly that he’d ended up in _England_?

“Better?” The boy took the thermos from Five’s hands. “My name is Anthony Lockwood, and these are my associates, Lucy Carlyle and George Cubbins. We’re agents from Lockwood & Co. What’s your name?”

“What?” Five said faintly. 

Agents? What sort of agents? Anthony, George and Lucy couldn’t be much older than Five was, and Five knew enough about the world outside the Academy to be aware that his and his siblings’ upbringing wasn’t quite normal.

“What’s your name?” Anthony repeated a little louder, as if he thought that the problem came from Five’s ears. 

“Five.”

Anthony cast a look over his shoulder, probably at one of his ‘associates.’ “Five what?” he asked in the gentle tone of someone talking to a person with a head injury. “What do you mean?”

“‘Five’ is my name.”

“Oh, okay. That’s a little… Well, I’m not one to judge.”

“Any last name?” Lucy asked. 

“Hargreeves.” Five looked at the girl, who was frowning down at him as though she hoped that if she stared hard enough, he would disappear from her sight. “Of the Umbrella Academy.”

“Is it like a fancy school?” George asked, eyes on his thermometer. “Because you look like you’ve seen some bad days.”

“You could say that,” Five said, the dry chuckle that tickled up his throat turning into a familiar gravelly cough. A lump of warm, sticky phlegm weighed on his tongue but he swallowed it, unwilling to spit it out in front of other people. “Seriously, you’ve never heard of the Umbrella Academy?”

“I haven’t,” Anthony said, before looking at his friends. “Lucy? George?”

“Nope,” George said. 

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lucy said.

That was odd. They’d been world-famous and it’d only been— “What year is it?”

“What? Did you hit your head?” George asked. “Lucy, did he hit his head?”

“How should I know?” Lucy retorted testily. 

“Well, he fell at your—”

“Just answer the question!” Five snapped. He pressed a thumb between his eyebrows, trying to physically push back the pain in his head. 

“2015. April 2015.”

Four years before the Apocalypse would strike, but almost twelve years after he’d left. His siblings would be—Five’s hands shook as he calculated the answer—a few months short of twenty-five. 

Anthony was still talking. “—tell us where you live. We’re working a job, you see, so it’s not safe to stay with us. One of us will take you back home. Lucy?”

“Why me? You need me here. Ask George to go.”

“All right. George?”

“Hey!”

“Where are we?” Five asked.

His question cut short the three friends’ bickering. “I think the pub’s name is ‘The Whispering Well,’” Anthony said. 

“ _Where_ is that pub? What city? What _country_?”

“Lavenham. England. Are you quite sure you’re okay?”

“Shit,” Five cursed with fervor. 

He clenched his fists in his lap and squeezed his eyes shut. _Get it together, Number Five!_ Okay. Okay, he could work with that. Yes, it wasn’t ideal that he’d need to travel from England to the US—too far for his power to help him—and he’d missed his intended exit point by quite a few years, but that left him four years to prevent the Apocalypse. This was more than enough. It didn’t matter that his siblings would be ten years older than him as long as he could save the world. 

“Now that’s settled,” Anthony said, “will you tell us where you live?”

“Twelve degrees now,” George said. “Hear anything, Lucy?”

“Not right now.”

What were these people playing at? “I don’t live anywhere near here,” Five said.

“Well, then, where are you staying at the moment? How did you get here?”

“That’s a long—”

“I heard something!” Lucy exclaimed. “Everyone shuts up.”

Five would have retorted something, but he’d recognized the urgency in her voice as meaning that it wasn’t the right moment to mess around. He didn’t know what was going on, but they obviously did, and he wasn’t going to be the clueless idiot who got all of them killed. 

“Female voice,” Lucy said. She’d closed her eyes but was still holding her rapier like she intended to use it. “Young. Oh—oh, god.”

“What is it?” Anthony asked.

“I know that voice. She—she was part of my old team. She’s calling my name.”

“Damn it, George was right,” Anthony said. “We’ve got a fetch on our hands. Everyone—”

“I can hear it too!” George said.

Five bit his tongue to stop himself from asking whether they were all insane, when suddenly _he_ could hear it—a faint whisper, the supplicant voice of a young girl calling for Lucy. “ _Lucy, Lucy, please come to me, it’s dark and cold and I’m so alone._ ”

“Look at the walls,” George said.

In the faint, wavering light of his companions’ flashlights, Five could see that water was dripping from the ceiling, running down the walls in continuous rivulets that made the white-washed surface glisten. 

“I bet that’s ectoplasm,” Anthony said. “We can’t let her box us in. Let’s—”

The voice died down and the water on the walls vanished, leaving no trace of humidity behind. For a moment, Five could only hear the steady pounding of his heart, everyone holding their breaths expectantly. He’d stood up when he’d first heard the voice and realized that he’d been poised for a jump. He forced himself to relax, hating that he’d let himself be unnerved by so little after living for two years in a god-forsaken wasteland. 

“Lucy?” Anthony asked. 

“I don’t hear it anymore. She must be toying with us.”

“What,” Five bit out through gritted teeth, “was _that_?”

As one man, the three companions turned to him, looking at him with round eyes. The weight of their combined focus made Five’s face burn. “It was a visitor,” Anthony said like it should have been obvious. Lucy had used that word before, _visitor_ , but now Five could hear something peculiar in the way Anthony said it, as if it should be _Visitor_ with a capital V. “I told you we were agents.”

“I don’t know what that means. It looked to me like we were just visited by a fucking _ghost_.”

“Well, yeah. Obviously.”

“Are you one of those asshole Americans who don’t believe in the Problem—” Like the word ‘Visitor’, Lucy said ‘problem’ as though it came with a capital letter. “—and just think that us Brits have lost our collective minds? Breaking news: yes, the ghosts _are_ real.”

“I—yes, I’m American, but I’ve never heard of that ‘problem’ you’re talking about. I do believe in ghosts—my brother Klaus can talk to them—but that’s…” 

He waved a hand at the wall, words failing him to describe what had just happened. The few times Five had heard Klaus describe his encounters with ghosts, his brother hadn’t mentioned them being able to mess with their environment. 

“…that’s something else,” he finished lamely.

“You’ve never heard of the Problem?” Lucy asked. “That’s impossible.”

“How long has this been going on? More than twelve years?”

“For about fifty years or so.”

Long before Five’s accidental time-travel, then. He’d been to the UK on an Umbrella Academy mission once, and no mentions of ghosts had been made at all. Five was fairly sure that if there had been a country-wide ghost problem there, their father would have jumped on the occasion to force Klaus into a more active use of his power. _I’ve never heard of their ‘Problem.’ They don’t know about the Umbrella Academy. What if—_ Oh, god. What if he’d hopped _dimensions_? At the thought, panic rose up in Five, filling his lungs and blocking his throat. Traveling back in time had been hard enough, but if he needed to add alternate dimensions to his calculations then how in _hell_ was he ever going to find his way home?

He realized he’d been breathing too fast only when a hand dropped on his shoulder, making him jump. “Hey, take a deep breath,” Anthony said. “It’s okay. The ghost is gone—for the moment.”

“No, no, you don’t—don’t understand—” The words were coming out of Five in short bursts, like gun shots. “—I messed up—never going back home—I can’t—”

“He’s losing it,” George said. “And we’re losing time. I still think that the locket is the source and that it’s somewhere in the building, but we’ve got to start looking for it.”

“All right,” Anthony said, giving Five’s shoulder a few more pats. “We’re going to make a circle here, and Lucy, you’ll stay with our new friend and protect him.”

“What? Why am _I_ stuck on babysitting duty while you two—”

“Temperature is dropping again!” George said almost cheerfully.

“Luce, please, we don’t have time to argue. George and I are going to do a quick tour of the building. Keep an ear out; maybe the ghost will give you a hint on where the locket might be.”

Five sat on a chair, numbly looking at Anthony, Lucy and George as they spread iron chains in a circle around him and then lined it up with salt. This was apparently supposed to be protection against the ghost, or so they said. Klaus had never said anything about a ghost’s touch being deadly, but maybe those English ghosts born out of the ‘Problem’ were of a different nature from the ones Klaus talked to. In any case, Five had no choice but to trust them to know what they were doing.

Anthony and George took off for the upper floors, leaving Five alone with Lucy. She kept her eyes trained on the walls, tilting her head like she was trying to listen for a very faint noise, but it was obvious that she was deeply unhappy to be stuck with him and had decided to pretend that he wasn’t there. Unfortunately for her, Five was of a contrarian nature. The shock of realizing he was in a different dimension had started to ebb, leaving him with a thousand questions. 

“I gather that this is your job,” he said, curiosity kicking in. “Are there no adult ghost hunters?”

“Adults are useless,” Lucy said. Five rather agreed with the sentiment, but he had the feeling that she meant something more specific than the usual and waited for her to elaborate. “Only children and teenagers have the necessary talent to see and hear ghosts. They lose it when they reach adulthood.”

“You’ll lose your ability when you’re an adult, then?” Could it be true of Klaus too? Of _all_ of them?

A muscle jumped in Lucy’s cheek; he must have touched a nerve. “It’s years away,” she said. “No use fretting about it.”

“Anthony said that this one was a—what was it, a fetch? What does that mean?”

“It’s a type two ghost—type two means that it’s dangerous—and it can look and sound like people you know. So don’t let yourself be lured away. If you hear a familiar voice, it’s probably just the ghost.”

“No one I know is anywhere near here,” Five murmured. He cleared his throat and said, “You said ‘type two.’ How many types of ghosts are there?”

Lucy diverted her eyes from the wall to shoot him an unfriendly look. “How long are you going to keep up the clueless act? Even if you’re a foreigner, I can’t believe that you—” She cut herself off, her eyes glazing over as she cocked her head to the side. “She’s back. Whatever happens, don’t step out of the circle.”

“What if—”

“ _Sshh._ ”

The water was back, dripping down the walls. Anthony had said that touching it could kill you, but it looked like ordinary water, except that there was too much of it, too quickly, for it to come from a natural source. Her face tight in concentration, Lucy appeared to be listening to the ghost, although Five couldn’t hear anything. 

“Lockwood! George! The ghost is back in the main room!” Lucy called. “I’m sure that the source is somewhere here,” she added in a murmur that must have been intended for herself. 

“ _Five_.” Five’s heart leaped in his chest at the sound of his name. He thought he might have imagined it, but Lucy’s head whipped to look at him. “ _Why don’t you come back?_ ”

“Does that sound like someone you know?” Lucy asked.

“Ye-yeah,” Five stuttered, his heart hammering against his ribs. “That’s my brother Luther.”

“ _Where the hell have you been, Five?_ ” Diego. “ _Five, just come back already._ ” Allison. “ _We’re waiting for you_.” Klaus. “ _We miss you, Five._ ” Ben.

The whispers became increasingly louder, coming from a dozen different directions at once. _Five. Five. FIVE._

“Five.” The name hadn’t been whispered this time, but sounded as if it had been uttered in this very room. In the semi-darkness, Five could see that someone other than he and Lucy was standing a few feet away from them next to the bar. 

“Vanya,” Five whispered. 

She looked the same as he’d left her, thirteen years old, wearing her uniform, long straight brown hair with a fringe that she tended to hide behind. Unthinkingly, Five lurched forward, heart in his throat, and he would have stepped over the line of iron and salt if not for the grip around his wrist.

“Stay in the circle, you idiot!” Lucy hissed in his ear. “Whoever you think it is, that’s just the ghost messing with your head.”

“That’s my sister, that’s—” Vanya’s form shimmered and she turned into Luther—not lanky, thirteen-year-old Luther, but a massive mountain of a man with bulging arms and enormous shoulders, who Five only recognized because he’d found his corpse in the ruins of a building. Adult Luther became adult Allison, then Diego, then Klaus. _Why did you leave, Five? Why did you abandon us? If you’d been there, then maybe you could have saved us._ Five could only watch, frozen, hypnotized by the parade of his dead siblings, the wetness on his cheeks letting him know that he was crying even though he couldn’t feel any burn in his eyes or pressure behind his forehead. 

“Hey. Hey! Snap out of it!” This was Lucy again, shouting in his face and shaking his shoulders. “The ghost is feeding off your emotions! You’re making it stronger!”

“I—what?”

“Ghosts are influenced by people’s emotions, especially negative ones. You need to get a grip!”

Five viciously dug his fingers in his thighs, focusing on the pain rather than on the ghost that he could still see at the corner of his eye, now looking like the photo of a seventeen-year-old Ben that Five had found in Vanya’s book. He took a long trembling breath and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. 

“Are you okay now?” Lucy asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, even though he felt as solid as wet tissue paper. 

“Good. Try to stay calm. I think I know where the source is.”

“The source?”

“It’s the ghost’s tie to our world. You really don’t know anything, do you?”

“Sorry,” Five said snippily. “I’m not from around here. So, where do you think it is?”

“Look over there. See that picture?” Lucy pointed her finger at a framed black-and-white photo hung on the wall. From what Five could tell, it was of a young woman and a young man holding each other by the waist. “It’s not touched by the water.”

Indeed, it looked like the dripping water had avoided the picture entirely, running around it like a river parting around a rock. It was the only dry patch left on the wall. 

“You think that the source—that locket that George mentioned?—is behind that picture?”

“Yes. You stay here, I’ll make a run for it.”

“Wait! There’s water on the floor too. Isn’t it dangerous to step in it?”

Lucy looked at the floor and bit out a curse. A sheen of water had spread everywhere except in their circle and it would be impossible not to walk in it to get to the picture. It looked like it was rising and Five wondered whether it could flow over the chains. 

“Maybe if I jump on the tables…” Lucy said, frowning in thought.

“No. I can do it. I can get to the picture.”

“What? No! I can’t let you do this. You’re a civilian and I—”

Five tuned out Lucy’s protests, focusing on his destination point. This was a five-feet jump, maximum, and the picture was on the left of the bar, so he could stand there to reach it. The problem was that he wasn’t sure he was recovered enough to make a jump. His head still ached fiercely and his limbs quivered with exhaustion—merely standing up was a strain on his resources. 

“Okay. I can do this,” he murmured to himself.

“Five, don’t—”

He folded space around himself and jumped into the thinner spot; after a cool rush of blue and white, he found himself balancing on top of the bar, his head spinning. _Don’t grab the wall,_ he reminded himself. He looked back at where Lucy stood in the circle, gaping at him.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ve got this.”

To be able to reach for the picture, Five had to slightly lean forward, which was made more perilous by the fact that he couldn’t use the wall for balance. His blood roared in his ears as he stretched his arm to touch the frame of the picture. He heard crashing noises behind him, as though Lucy were throwing things, but he pushed it away as background noise. Lucy looked like she could defend herself—this was her job, after all. Five’s fingers closed around the corner of the frame and he pulled it away from the wall, revealing a small hole in it. He shoved his fingers inside the hole, hoping fervently that none of the ghost water had touched it. His fingers searched the hole blindly, eventually bumping against an object—when he extracted it from the hole, he saw that it was a small golden locket. It wasn’t engraved that Five could see, but the metal was dull and scratched. 

“ _No! Don’t touch it! This is mine, mine._ ” The ghost didn’t sound like any of Five’s siblings or like Lucy’s old teammate, which made it easier to ignore her.

“Got it!” he shouted to Lucy. “What do I do with it?”

“Get it back to me! Quick, before she attacks you!”

Right as she said it, Five saw a vague cloudy form pop up in front of him. It turned solid-looking, materializing into a young woman with wavy brown hair and wide, enraged eyes. She reached out for him, her fingers hooked like claws, and Five jumped back to the circle, almost crashing into Lucy. His vision was eaten with black spots and he felt like he might collapse again. 

“Whoa!” Lucy’s hands were on his shoulders again, stabilizing him. “Do you have the locket? Where is it?”

Five gave it to her and she wrapped the object into a fine silver net. A shrill, feminine cry pierced the air, pitched so high that Five instinctively covered his ears with his hands to block it. Even from behind his hands he could still hear the scream, which made his headache spike to blinding levels. When the pressure in the room dropped, it was so sudden that Five wavered and fell to his knees. 

“Are you all right?”

Five fell back on his butt, bringing his knees to his chest and burying his face against them. “Yes, I’m fine.”

There was some rustling and shuffling as Lucy sat down next to him. “Were all those people your family?” For the first time tonight she sounded soft, tentative.

“My siblings.”

“Oh. You have a lot of siblings.”

“Four brothers. Two sisters.”

“What happened to them?” When Five didn’t answer immediately, she said, “Sorry, you probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“They’re not dead,” Five said hotly, raising his head. The grey faces of Luther, Diego, Allison and Klaus flashed in front of his eyes. “Okay, maybe they are. In a way. But not for good.”

Lucy’s expression, which Five had always seen be some flavor of severe or annoyed, softened with unbearable sympathy. “The fact that ghosts exist doesn’t mean that people can come back to life,” she said gently. “If they’re dead, you can’t—”

“You saw what I did right there, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, her nose scrunching up as if she didn’t like thinking about it. “You teleported or something.”

“I bend space. I can bend time, too. I time-traveled seventeen years in the future and couldn’t travel back. Found my siblings’ dead bodies.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll make it back to them.” Five’s fingers clenched on the fabric of his pants. “I’ll do it, even if it takes me a lifetime to succeed.” 

He caught the look on Lucy’s face, startled and confused at the same time. “I know I’ve seen you teleport,” she said, “but _time-travel_? I don’t know, that’s a lot to believe.”

“You live in a country infested with ghosts.”

She shrugged. “It’s been that way all my life.”

“Well, I was _born_ with those powers.”

Lucy looked about to say something else when Anthony and George barged into the room, the beams of their flashlights wavering madly.

“Lucy, are you all right?” Anthony shouted.

“I’m fine. Everything is under control. I sealed the source.”

“Excellent. We heard you, but we were blocked by the water in one of the rooms upstairs.”

“Who was that ghost, anyway?” Five’s head felt fuzzy, but he could still see the ghost’s face and wanted to at least know her name. “Do you know?”

“Oh, yes, her name was Amanda Wheeler. She was found drowned in the well behind the pub about forty years ago. Probably threw herself in it.”

“A well? Any relation to the name of the pub?”

“That’s where the name comes from,” George said. He’d gotten a cookie out of one of his pockets and was munching on it. “Morbid, right?”

“That’s disgusting,” Five said.

“Well, that’s it for tonight,” Anthony said. “Good job, team. Five, do you have anywhere to go? We can give you a bed for the night, if you need it.”

Some deep-rooted instinct made Five want to say that, no, thank you, he was all right on his own. But his exhaustion was bone-deep and the thought of sleeping in a bed, of maybe having a _shower_ , sounded so good he could have cried for how much he wanted it. He could start working again on a way to travel back to his own dimension when he felt marginally less like death warmed over. He was allowed one night of rest.

“Thank you, yes. Sleeping in a bed would be good.”

Lucy helped him up, then kept a hand at his elbow as they all exited the now silent pub, walking into the foggy night.


End file.
